Google Webmaster Hangouts 2-1-2018

Ideally Your Sitemap File Name Should Remain The Same

If you run a site with inventory that changes often you may be creating new sitemap files often (even daily). If you can you should aim to use the same sitemap file name as opposed to one with an appended date. This makes it easier for G to keep up with your changes.

CDNs Don’t Damage SEO But May Temporarily Impact It

Google tends to treat CDNs as a hosting platform. The platform doesn’t matter. However, what does matter is that Google can crawl the platform you’re using. They will assess how much load they want to put on a particular host or CDN and potentially decide to crawl it less.

This could create a shift in rankings when switching over to a CDN. However, this is only applicable to content that isn’t already indexed.

Here’s The Tech To Adopt To Help You With Mobile Rankings

Here are the tips John Mueller shared in regards to what helps Google with mobile related indexing / rankings:

1 – It helps if your serving 1 URL for both desktop and mobile (responsive designs) as long as it serves the exact same content / user experience. This reduces the amount of technical implementation necessary

2 – Taking this a step further could consist of moving your entire mobile site version to AMP

Keep in mind that can be done on a page by page basis. Also remember that if you have AMP setup separately to your normal website you’ll have 2 URLs that need to be crawled and indexed. If AMP is canonical everything will be based on the AMP page. This could give you a huge speed advantage. John says this is one way to get a lot of value for little effort.

3 – Progressive Web Apps (PWA) – This is a different ball of wax. There is a lot more complexity involved in terms of a fully index-able site. If you have an engineering team that can address these issues then it may be something to incorporate.

Cache As Much As Possible

This has long been a speed boost tip in terms of site load times. It allows a site or page to load from memory rather than the browser having to “look at” the original source code and display it.

Publishing Content Around Trends May help

This could create a lot of value over time. However you have to be aware of the expectations built with your users. Doing this doesn’t mean you’ll get position 1 rankings but it may help with some consistency.

Our Competitors All Use Different Schema Markup – Are They All Correct?

John mentions that there are a lot of different ways to accomplish the same things with schema.org markup. You have to simply use the markup that works for you. However, that doesn’t mean that Google will automatically use all of the markup you decide on. He recommended reviewing the search developer documentation to choose which markup you use.

Conclusion

Speed and markup were common topics again on this hangout. It appears as though that these two address areas that Google is concerned with now as well as in the near future. AMP has consistently been referred to by John in regards to the mobile first index. He even went so far as to say that the AMP team is particularly responsive (compared to other Google teams) when it comes to improving their product. While there’s no guarantee that this tech will remain in Google’s good graces forever – it did seem to be a resounding recommendation.